Paradox: Stonewalling social networks

The people formerly known as the audience, the passive consumers of broadcasts and ready made and mass produced stuff have become empowered. We can talk back, we can interact with producers, we can co-create or make our own content.

We can comment, leave ratings – and even if we don’t contribute, companies will try hard to gather as much information as possible about who we are and what we want.

But where do you complain when something is not working, who can you ask for help, who can sort out misunderstandings? Which country is that company even in?

Good luck trying to find someone you can actually call or a real person who will read your mail and respond. Oh, they will listen to customers – but only if it can be fully automated. The irony is that the social network platforms are absolutely impossible to talk to.

Free is a lie - you pay and you are sold

Free is lie, says Aral Balkan in his speech at London RSA. He points out the many ways in which you lose privacy or in which the personal information you leave behind by using free internet services creates massive businesses, and makes it easier to target you as a consumer. 
It's the usual story, but told with gusto. We know it all too well. 
Balkan is trying to create an alternative web service that does not take your private info. A long shot, it seems.

For 9 kr. reklamer pr. dansker om dagen

Jeg fik nogle interessante tal fra Danmarks statistik forleden:

Omsætningen af reklamer er faldet markant igennem de sidste 5 år, men selve salget af plads i både trykte medier, radio, TV og internet er steget.

I stedet er det alle andre dele af branchen der er skrumpet, inklusive rådgivning, design og konceptudvikling. Man kunne fristes til at konkludere, at der er flere reklamer, men der bruges færre penge på at producere dem.

Omsætningen svarer i øvrigt til 3225 pr. dansker om året - knap 9 kr. om dagen. 

There is only one Watson - and Siri is its prophet

There is only one traffic and Google is driving it.
The Cloud is everywhere, in everything.

The business of organizing civil society

The German ride-sharing service ”Mitfahrzentrale” turns out to be a really good example of how a little bit of commercial organization can mobilize resources in civil society that would otherwise be wasted.

I used to hitchhike quite a bit. You would find a good place to stand, maybe hold a sign with your destination, stick out your thumb and hope for a ride. It’s a cheap way to get around, it makes better use of all those empty car seats on the highways – and it allows for all kinds of great meetings and conversations among strangers.

But it’s pretty unpredictable for both riders and drivers. You may end up with a jerk beside you. You never know how long the journey will take, and as a driver, it’s not likely that the rider will offer any payment. Should anything happen, you probably will have no idea what the identity of the other person is.

A ride-sharing service takes a lot of the uncertainty out of this. You go online, post where and when you are going (e.g. Hamburg to Kolding, Thursday afternoon) or you browse the list of rides that are offered by drivers who will take riders.

There’s a set price, so the driver can recover some of the costs (and the ride-sharing services gets a cut of that), and the users of the service are registered. In some cases there are reputation systems, so you can asses the person you will be riding with beforehand.

The point here is that by adding a minimal level of commercial activity, you can make the sharing of resources much more attractive and easy. There are great resources that can be mobilized in the non-commercial realm of civil society, but a lot of the potential is never realized, because of uncertainty, inconvenience, opaque circumstances etc.

This points to a very interesting area of new businesses: providing the framework to harness the potential and resources of civil society.

Generally, I believe we will see a lot more hybrid organizations in the future, where commercial and non-commercial players interact, resulting in the creation of a lot more value than if the game was only pure commercial or pure non-commercial. 

There is a lot of discussion about "gov 2.0" and what the appropriate role of government should be. One of the slogans is to move "from provider to enabler" - in other words, that the government should focus on creating the necessary conditions, infrastructure and framework for productive interaction among companies and citizens. 
That is exactly what the ride-sharing service does. It doesn't deliver the driving, but enables people to get around in a more efficient way. 

What should we tag this with? Collaborative consumption, mesh economy, social networks, enabler/provider, frugal solutions. There is a lot going on. 

6 characteristics of the future web

Kevin Kelly remains an amazing intellectual force. In this podcast – of a presentation he gave at the Web 2.0 conference back in November - he presents his 6 characteristics of our relationship with the future web:

- Screening, every surface will be a window to information

- Interacting, we will be IN the web, not on it, with full body interface to ubiquitous data.

- Sharing. Anything that can be shared will be shared, and when information is shared it will increase in value.

- Flowing, data will be organized like streams, moving forward, weaving together the data emitted by every object and every person. The default mode is always on

- - Accessing. Without owning. You don’t buy individual items – books, music, films – you access it when you need it.

- Generating, raw data will have little value, but qualities that are generated for a particular context will be where the money is.

The whole thing lasts 20 minutes. You will feel wiser afterwards.